Collaboration is risky. If it fails, if the occupation is wound up prematurely and the bad guys come back to power, you might find yourself in some serious trouble.
I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.
You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.
All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.
If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.
Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.
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